1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to XML-documents, and more particularly to a method and an apparatus for storing data of an XML-document in a relational database and to the resultant data structure.
2. Description of Related Art
Within a short time after standardization of the eXtended Markup Language (XML), XML has become increasingly popular among software developers, and in particular, among software developers for world-wide-web applications. XML appears on the way to becoming a worldwide standard for the creation of a structured web-based document.
XML is regarded as a meta-language for describing markup languages. XML provides facilities to define tags and structural relationships between the tags. XML is a platform independent set of rules for putting structured data into a file. With XML, the content data may be separated from the presentation or formatting information.
XML-documents are increasingly used for the exchange of data between different database servers, for example in electronic commerce applications. In this case, when XML-document files are used for data exchange between two database servers or when queries are made on large XML-documents, the XML-document files have to be imported into a database. While some database management systems are said to be “XML enabled,” storing XML-documents in any relational database system is problematic.
Databases and XML-document files offer complementary functionality for storing data. Databases store data for efficient retrieval, whereas XML-document files offer an easy information exchange that enables interoperability between applications.